Excerpts from a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, October 23, 2010

Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its dark, intolerant past. Thousands of policemen in full riot gear had to divide their time between protecting a few hundred “LBGT” activists (about half of them imported from Western Europe for the occasion) and battling ten times as many young protesters in the side streets.

The parade, it should be noted, was prominently attended by the U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade Mary Warlick, by the head of the European Commission Office, Vincent Degert of France, and by the head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mission in Serbia, Dimitris Kipreos. Needless to say, none of them had attended the enthronment of the new Serbian Patriarch a week earlier. Two days later, Hillary Clinton came to Belgrade and praised the Tadic regime for staging the parade.

Mrs. Clinton et al are enjoying the fruits of one man’s two decades of hard work in Eastern Europe. George Soros can claim, more than any other individual, that his endeavors have helped turn the lands of “Real Socialism” in central and eastern Europe away from their ancestors, their cultural and spiritual roots. The process is far from over, but his Open Society Institute and its extensive network of subsidiaries east of the Trieste-Stettin line have successfully legitimized the notions that only two decades ago would have seemed bizarre, laughable or demonic to the denizens of the eastern half of Europe.

The package was first tested here in America. Through his Open Society Institute and its vast network of affiliates Soros has provided extensive financial and lobbying support here for

Legalization of hard drugs: We should accept that “substance abuse is endemic in most societies,” he says. Thanks to his intervention the terms “medicalization” and “non-violent drug offender” have entered public discourse, and pro-drug legalization laws were passed in California and Arizona in the 90s.

Euthanasia: In 1994 Soros—a self-professed atheist—launched his Project Death in America (PDIA) and provided $15 million in its initial funding. (It is noteworthy that his mother, a member of the pro-suicide Hemlock Society, killed herself, and that Soros mentions unsympathetically his dying father’s clinging on to life for too long.) PDIA supports physician-assisted suicide and works “to begin forming a network of doctors that will eventually reach into one-fourth of America’s hospitals” and, in a turn of phrase chillingly worthy of Orwell, lead to “the creation of innovative models of care and the development of new curricula on dying.”

Population replacement: Soros is an enthusiastic promoter of open immigration and amnesty & special rights for immigrants. He has supported the National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Law Center, National Immigration Forum, and dozens of others. He also promotes expansion of public welfare, and in late 1996 he created the Emma Lazarus Fund that has given millions in grants to nonprofit legal services groups that undermine provisions of the welfare legislation ending immigrant entitlements.

Soros supports programs and organizations that further abortion rights and increased access to birth control devices; advocate ever more stringent gun control; and demand abolition of the death penalty. He supports radical feminists and “gay” activists, same-sex “marriage” naturally included. OSI states innocently enough that its objectives include “the strengthening of civil society; economic reform; education at all levels; human rights; legal reform and public administration; public health; and arts and culture,” but the way it goes about these tasks is not “philanthropy” but political activism in pursuit of all the familiar causes of the radical left—and some additional, distinctly creepy ones such as “Death in America.”

Soros’s “philanthropic” activities in America have been applied on a far grander scale abroad. His many foundations say that they are “dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society.” What this means in practice? Regarding “Women’s Health” programs in Central and South-Eastern Europe, one will look in vain for breast cancer detection programs, or for prenatal or post-natal care. No, Soros’s main goal is “to improve the quality of abortion services.” Accordingly his Public Health Program has focused on the introduction of easily available abortion all over the region, and the introduction of manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) abortion in Macedonia, Moldova, and Russia. Why is Soros so keen to promote more abortions? Overpopulation cannot be the reason: the region is experiencing a huge demographic collapse and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Unavailability of abortions cannot be the answer either: only five European countries had more abortions than live births in 2000: the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Belarus, Romania and Ukraine. The only answer is that Soros wants as few little European Orthodox Christians born into this world as possible.

Soros’s Public Health Programs additionally “support initiatives focusing on the specific health needs of several marginalized communities,” such as “gays” and AIDS sufferers, and promote “harm reduction” focusing on needle/syringe exchange and supply of methadone to adicts. His outfits lobby governments to scrap “repressive drug policies.” Over the past decade and a half the Soros network has given a kick-start to previously non-existent “gay” activism in almost all of its areas of operation. The campaign for “LGBT Rights” is directed from Budapest, publishing lesbian and gay books in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia, opening Gay and Lesbian Centers in Ukraine and Rumania. Its activists routinely attack the Orthodox Church as a key culprit for alleged discrimination of “LGBTs.”

Education is a key pillar of Soros’s activities. His Leitmotif is the dictum that “no-one has a monopoly on the truth” and that “civic education” should replace the old “authoritarian” model. Even under communism Eastern Europe has preserved very high educational standards, but the Soros Foundation seeks to replace the old system with the concept of schools as “exercise grounds” for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities in the process of equal-footed interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline rooted in the oppressive legacy of patriarchal past.” The purpose of education is not “acquisition of knowledge”: the teacher is to become the class “designer” and his relationship with students based on “partnership.” Soros’s reformers also insist on an active role of schools in countering the allegedly unhealthy influence of the family on students, which “still carries an imprint of nationalist, sexist, racist, and homophobic prejudices rampant in the society at large.”

“Racism” is Soros’s regular obsession, but he had a problem finding it in racially non-diverse East European countries. This has been resolved by identifying a designated victim group—gypsies (“Roma”). His protégés now come up with policy demands to “protect” this group that could have been written by Rev. Jesse Jackson:

anti-bias training of teachers and administrators;

integration of Romani history and culture in the textbooks at all levels;

recognition by governments of “the Roma slavery and the Holocaust through public apology along with urgent adoption of a package of reparatory measures.”

A budding race relations industry is already in place, with the self-serving agenda of finding “discrimination” in order to keep itself in place for ever.

To make his agenda appear “normal” to the targeted population, millions of East Europeans are force-fed the daily fare of OSI agitprop by “the Soros media”—the term is by now well established in over a dozen languages—such as the B-92 media conglomerate in Serbia.

The social dynamics Soros uses to penetrate the target countries is interesting. To thousands of young East Europeans to become a “Soroshite” represents today what joining the Party represented to their parents: an alluring opportunity to have a reasonably paid job, to belong to a privileged elite, for many to travel abroad. The few chosen for the future new Nomenklatura go to Soros’s own Central European University in Budapest. In all post-communist countries Soros relies overwhelmingly on the sons and daughters of the old Communist establishment who are less likely to be tainted by any atavistic vestiges of their native soil, culture and tradition. The comparison with the janissary corps of the Ottoman Army is more apt than that with the Communist Party. The new janissaries, just like the old, have to prove their credentials by being more zealous than the Master himself.

The key ideological foundation for Soros’s beliefs is the same: that all countries are basically social arrangements, artificial, temporary and potentially dangerous. A plethora of quotes from his writings will make it clear that he thinks that owing allegiance to any of them is inherently irrational, and attaching one’s personal loyalty to it is absurd. Like Marx’s proletarian, Soros knows of no loyalty to a concrete country. He could serve any—or indeed all—of them, if they can be turned into the tools of his Wille zur Macht. In 1792, it could have been France, in 1917 Russia. Today, the United States is his host organism of choice because it is so powerful, and its media scene is open to penetration by his rabidly anti-traditionalist and deeply anti-American worldview and political agenda.

Textbooks and educational curricular reforms pushed by Soros in Eastern Europe indicate that he is trying to perform crude dumbing down of the young. Within months of coming to power in October 2000 the “reformists” within Serbia and their foreign sponsors insisted that schools—all schools, from kindergarden to universities—must be reformed and turned from “authoritarian” institutions into poligons for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities in the process of equal-footed interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline rooted in the opressive legacy of patriarchal past.” They started with primary schools, with a pilot program of “educational workshops” for 7-12 year olds. The accompanying manual, sponsored by UNICEF and financed by the Open Society, denigrades the view that the purpose of education is acquisition of knowledge and insists that the teacher has to become the class “designer” and his relationship with students based on “partnership.”

The reformers devote particular attention to the more active role of schools in countering the allegedly unhealthy influence of the family on students, which “still carries an imprint of nationalist, sexist, [anti-Roma] racist, and homophobic prejudices rampant in the society at large.” The time-honored Balkan tradition of slapping childrens’ bottoms when they exceed limits is now presented in the elementary classroom as a form of criminal abuse that should be reported and acted upon. Traditional gender roles are relativized by “special projects” that entail cross-dressing and temporary adoption of opposite gender names.

Soros’s vision is hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. His core belief—that traditional morality, faith, and community based on shared memories are all verboten—is at odds even with the classical “open society” liberalism of Popper and Hayek, by whom he swears. His hatred of religion is the key. He promotes an education system that will neutralize any lingering spiritual yearnings of the young, and promote the loss of a sense of place and history already experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of Westerners are already on the path of alienation that demands every imaginable form of self-indulgence, or else leads to drugs, or suicide, or conversion to Islam or some other cult.

To understand Soros it is necessary to understand globalization as a revolutionary, radical project. In the triumph of liberal capitalism, the enemies of civilization such as Soros have found the seeds of future victory for their paradigm that seeks to eradicate all traditional structures capable of resistance. The revolutionary character of the Open Society project is revealed in its relentless adherence to the mantra of Race, Gender and Sexuality. His goal is a new global imperium based that will be truly totalitarian. But he is making a colossal miscalculation. He does not realize that the unassimilated and unassimilable multitudes do not want to be the tools of his will to power. Illegal aliens in America, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany and Pakistanis in Britain have their own, instinctive scenario, and it does not entail leaving Soros and his ilk in positions of power, or alive.

Read the entire article on the Chronicles of Culture website (new window will open). Reprinted with permission.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, an expert on foreign affairs, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad. His latest book is The Krajina Chronicle: A History of the Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia.